If you’ve taken the time (and I hope you have), to watch any of the Pornmobile confessions (like Luke’s), you would have heard a recurring theme: many of the young men interviewed encountered pornography in their youth. Whether through a dad’s playboy magazine, or a neighborhood friend’s stash, most of the men (and women) struggling with pornography addiction today experienced early exposure to the content, and back then, you had to work pretty hard to access pornography.
In today’s tech-centric world, any child with unrestricted Internet access is just one click away from the videos, messages, photos and products generated by the $97 billion pornography industry, and through our culture, few markets remain immune from pornography’s impact. Kids are confronted with pornified-content in the shows and videos they see, in sexualized marketing and in the lyrics of the music they listen to.
This cultural comfort with pornography is why I was hardly fazed when I learned that teen- and tween-hit ABC Family Show “Pretty Little Liars” referenced Japanese cartoon porn in last week’s episode. Japanese cartoon porn, as described in a recent blog on our site by Tanith Carey: “is where the wide-eyed faces and voices of five-year-old girls are transplanted onto porn star bodies with huge breasts. These videos invariable showing naive and innocent female characters being abused and mistreated – often by father figures, like teachers.” Undoubtedly, thanks to the show’s reference, some curious kids conducted a brief Google search and were confronted with this type of content. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there is substantial cross-marketing between cartoon pornography, user-generated pornography and filmed adult pornography. The categories available on most pornography and cartoon pornography sites today offer any adult or child viewer bondage, cumshots, teen, orgy, cartoon, hardcore and triple penetration content… in other words, content that no 10, 11, 12, 13 or 20 year-old is emotionally or psychologically ready to handle.
Perhaps you don’t believe your child would search for Japanese cartoon pornography. Studies have shown that 90% of 8-16 year-olds have viewed pornography online (mostly while doing homework), and the average age of a child’s first exposure to pornography is just 11 years old. As our Babysitter Commercial highlighted, through the Internet, kids also have free and easy accidental access to hardcore pornography when they misspell common words or mistype a web address online, and almost 80% of accidental access to pornography occurs in the home. Even if they aren’t looking for pornography, it will find them.
If you’re like me, you don’t want your kids to experience the shame, to become addicted or to be misled by pornography’s lies. I hope you will check out our parent resources for information about how to protect your children today. Also, check out X3’s Company Episode 6: The Talk – Parent and Sex, for some fabulous information about parenting today.